I should have done a follow up post many weeks ago but have been putting if off. Well I'm going to put it off again. I have another therapy session today and I'll post later this week (hopefully) about how it's going.
In general, I hate talking about my feelings so therapy is pretty lame but I'm sure it will help in the long run and positive it won't help in the short term-these things take time.
The therapist I ended up choosing is well, old, but she seems sweet and nice and I'm comfortable talking with her but I keep wondering if it would be better to get someone who might understand me more-but then I think of all her experience and how that might be helpful, and I think about having to do the start up appointments with an entirely new person and that well, sounds lame.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Imposter project
A quick update, the internal draft of the final report for the project I've written about the last two post is due on Friday, to my PI. I've worked really hard on it these past two days and am proud of myself but it still has a lot more that needs to be done.
I'm so burnt from Monday and Tuesday 10 hour days that my brain is having trouble starting this morning. It's 830am now so I'm allowing myself to goof off and drink coffee until 9am.
Life has been pretty busy, I'm training for a half marathon and think I overdid it on sunday with my 8 mile run that included hills. We ran for 100 minuets. To date my longest run had been 60 minuets. The training plan called for a 6 mile run but the race is mostly hills so we wanted to include some hills in this run and since we left from my friends house to the hills it turned out our run became 8 miles. Lesson learned my quads are so sore!
I'm also practicing rugby on Tuesdays, going to yoga on Wednesdays and trying to climb at the indoor gym at least one a week, ideally twice. With this project taking over my life climbing is the first activity to get cut.
My mom is buying a manufactured home and we have been waiting for escrow to close for the past month. Now it is scheduled to close on Thursday, which is exciting but my week is already so busy with this project and during the week-end I was hoping to catch up on life and climb and run and Sunday we are going to the near by city for a major wine tasting event . . . . Oh and Saturday was a rugby tournament I wanted to go to . . . looks like I'll be moving my mom instead. Small price to pay to help my mom end her life of renting. She has to be out of her rental by July 12, and next week-end is Forth of July. I'm hoping she will be able to wake up in her new place on Sunday, even if we don't get everything moved in time.
The major news in my life is that I'm going to see a therapist today. I went to my primary doctor (who I had only seen once) and mentioned that I think I might have depression but wasn't sure how to choose a therapist and what the best plan of action would be. This imposter project has brought back a lot of the bad habits I created for myself while writing my dissertation in postdoc town. My husband is finally concerned; all the times I thought I might have depression in postdoc town my husband always shrugged it off and told me just to get stronger, i.e. suck it up. I always thought this would work but I kept gaining weight and kept feeling unhappy and kept watching online TV instead of working.
What kind of suprised me was that I told the doctor I didn't want to take any medicine and she was very pro-meds. Although I see her points I really want to try and aid my mental state first by seeing a therapist and possibly identifiying my issues first. She stated that a really small dose can increase your saratonines and aid in the healing process, she also said my therapist and I might get to the point where they decide a drug is needed. My husband is also anti drugs, I think mostly because his mom is bipolar and he sees how the medication changes her.
This week is really busy but I'll aim to post something next week to keep anyone who is still reading this updated.
I'm so burnt from Monday and Tuesday 10 hour days that my brain is having trouble starting this morning. It's 830am now so I'm allowing myself to goof off and drink coffee until 9am.
Life has been pretty busy, I'm training for a half marathon and think I overdid it on sunday with my 8 mile run that included hills. We ran for 100 minuets. To date my longest run had been 60 minuets. The training plan called for a 6 mile run but the race is mostly hills so we wanted to include some hills in this run and since we left from my friends house to the hills it turned out our run became 8 miles. Lesson learned my quads are so sore!
I'm also practicing rugby on Tuesdays, going to yoga on Wednesdays and trying to climb at the indoor gym at least one a week, ideally twice. With this project taking over my life climbing is the first activity to get cut.
My mom is buying a manufactured home and we have been waiting for escrow to close for the past month. Now it is scheduled to close on Thursday, which is exciting but my week is already so busy with this project and during the week-end I was hoping to catch up on life and climb and run and Sunday we are going to the near by city for a major wine tasting event . . . . Oh and Saturday was a rugby tournament I wanted to go to . . . looks like I'll be moving my mom instead. Small price to pay to help my mom end her life of renting. She has to be out of her rental by July 12, and next week-end is Forth of July. I'm hoping she will be able to wake up in her new place on Sunday, even if we don't get everything moved in time.
The major news in my life is that I'm going to see a therapist today. I went to my primary doctor (who I had only seen once) and mentioned that I think I might have depression but wasn't sure how to choose a therapist and what the best plan of action would be. This imposter project has brought back a lot of the bad habits I created for myself while writing my dissertation in postdoc town. My husband is finally concerned; all the times I thought I might have depression in postdoc town my husband always shrugged it off and told me just to get stronger, i.e. suck it up. I always thought this would work but I kept gaining weight and kept feeling unhappy and kept watching online TV instead of working.
What kind of suprised me was that I told the doctor I didn't want to take any medicine and she was very pro-meds. Although I see her points I really want to try and aid my mental state first by seeing a therapist and possibly identifiying my issues first. She stated that a really small dose can increase your saratonines and aid in the healing process, she also said my therapist and I might get to the point where they decide a drug is needed. My husband is also anti drugs, I think mostly because his mom is bipolar and he sees how the medication changes her.
This week is really busy but I'll aim to post something next week to keep anyone who is still reading this updated.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
All is well that ends well
Turns out I am not an imposter.
Last Tuesday I had that phone meeting, which I think went well, and it led to another phone meeting that happened yesterday with the same client*. The day before, on Monday, I had a nice meeting with my PI about the project. The client meeting was going to be an update on what had been done on the project and what was still left to do. I organized my thought for this meeting in a power point form. Initially I was writing things down on a notepad but I just love power point. I got to make the font black for things we had finished and blue for aspects needing further work. I color coded slides by task. This was how I would organize my thoughts for many of my meetings with my Ph.D. adviser (those also included plots, this one was just text since the client wasn't going to look at it). It worked nice to have this powerpoint because this is what I showed to my current PI, and he added text and his own thoughts into it while we talked.
The meeting with my PI was so great!! I really needed to be brought back down to Earth on this project. I now feel I have a good list of tasks I can complete and told my PI I'd like to do this again in two weeks-to again organize myself.
Then the client meeting went into a lot less detail than I had thought. We had a nice discussion and I think I impressed him at times, which is good.
Turns out we should have a finished product for the client to review by July 1st. Although it might be tough to meet this deadline I am very excited to have a deadline, I work much better when I have a schedule. Today, however, I'm taking a break from this project but Thursday and Friday I'm going to get a significant portion finished. I'm really excited about the work and happy to be excited again about doing it.
**client might be an improper term here. When I say client I mean the other consulting firm we are subcontracted to work for. The both of us are working for an actual client.
Last Tuesday I had that phone meeting, which I think went well, and it led to another phone meeting that happened yesterday with the same client*. The day before, on Monday, I had a nice meeting with my PI about the project. The client meeting was going to be an update on what had been done on the project and what was still left to do. I organized my thought for this meeting in a power point form. Initially I was writing things down on a notepad but I just love power point. I got to make the font black for things we had finished and blue for aspects needing further work. I color coded slides by task. This was how I would organize my thoughts for many of my meetings with my Ph.D. adviser (those also included plots, this one was just text since the client wasn't going to look at it). It worked nice to have this powerpoint because this is what I showed to my current PI, and he added text and his own thoughts into it while we talked.
The meeting with my PI was so great!! I really needed to be brought back down to Earth on this project. I now feel I have a good list of tasks I can complete and told my PI I'd like to do this again in two weeks-to again organize myself.
Then the client meeting went into a lot less detail than I had thought. We had a nice discussion and I think I impressed him at times, which is good.
Turns out we should have a finished product for the client to review by July 1st. Although it might be tough to meet this deadline I am very excited to have a deadline, I work much better when I have a schedule. Today, however, I'm taking a break from this project but Thursday and Friday I'm going to get a significant portion finished. I'm really excited about the work and happy to be excited again about doing it.
**client might be an improper term here. When I say client I mean the other consulting firm we are subcontracted to work for. The both of us are working for an actual client.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
I'm an imposter!
Friday I was up North helping one of our field offices move. He was in a space too big for just him and my company is trying to save money. They made him find something 1/4 the price. I decided to go there and help since 1) my PI mentioned they were looking for volunteers and 2) it is where I'm from and where my family lives and I was overdue for a visit. This background was just to say that I wasn't in the office Friday but I later saw I had a voice mail from another company we work with and they want to talk about the progress of a particular project that I am now the project manager on.
More background: We recently had an employee quit. He left under good terms for a better job. Him and I were working on this project together, just us, and we hadn't gotten very far by the time he left. I by default have been given this project. It's a rather large project involving no field work. I've only been given little bits and pieces of information about the project and in general when I work on it I feel greatly overwhelmed by the vastness of what needs to be accomplished. I've cut it down into little tasks but all of them are related so when I work on one tasks I read something interesting and get distracted on another tasks. The employee who left has been working in the area for 8 years and did his undergrad and grad work in the area. He was the perfect candidate for this job due to all the knowledge he had about the field area, ect. My role was to aid in his assessment but compiling data, making plots, ect.
As I said I feel very lost but don't even know the right questions to ask to get me on track.
I have a great fear that I am going to sound like an ass on the phone on Tuesday and have been sitting at the computer today trying to piece something together that I can talk about, some kind of update to let this other company know how I am doing. But in all the time I've been sitting here I haven't even opened a file yet about the project.
I fear that my fear of failing is causing me to have a fear of trying.
More background: We recently had an employee quit. He left under good terms for a better job. Him and I were working on this project together, just us, and we hadn't gotten very far by the time he left. I by default have been given this project. It's a rather large project involving no field work. I've only been given little bits and pieces of information about the project and in general when I work on it I feel greatly overwhelmed by the vastness of what needs to be accomplished. I've cut it down into little tasks but all of them are related so when I work on one tasks I read something interesting and get distracted on another tasks. The employee who left has been working in the area for 8 years and did his undergrad and grad work in the area. He was the perfect candidate for this job due to all the knowledge he had about the field area, ect. My role was to aid in his assessment but compiling data, making plots, ect.
As I said I feel very lost but don't even know the right questions to ask to get me on track.
I have a great fear that I am going to sound like an ass on the phone on Tuesday and have been sitting at the computer today trying to piece something together that I can talk about, some kind of update to let this other company know how I am doing. But in all the time I've been sitting here I haven't even opened a file yet about the project.
I fear that my fear of failing is causing me to have a fear of trying.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Sickness
Wednesday night I came down with a sore throat. It prevented me from going into work on Thursday and then, on Friday, I only worked a few hours. My employer has asked that we don't come into work sick so instead of my long Monday morning commute I stayed home and went to the doctor. I only have a sinus infection, although one that has given me a terrible headache, face-ache and greatly reduced my energy levels, and one that the doctor said is still contagious. Thus I stayed home from work again today. I have work I could be doing from home but it's work I'm not very excited about so I've been using my sickness as an excuse to watch tv. I've caught up on all my favorite shows and even some of my not so favorite shows. I'm home now at 6pm, having an insatiable thirst and wishing I had the motivation to work some of this hated project. I keep telling myself tomorrow will be better but likely it won't. I think tomorrow should be another stay home day and Thursday I will go into the office. Friday I'm scheduled to help one of our other offices move, since he is located near my family and I needed an excuse to go there anyway to visit.
Overall I wrote this post to confess that even though I am really sick I think I've just been using it as an excuse not to work on this project (that doesn't really have a deadline). Wish me luck that tomorrow I'll get a few hours of work accomplished, and maybe even some tonight.
Overall I wrote this post to confess that even though I am really sick I think I've just been using it as an excuse not to work on this project (that doesn't really have a deadline). Wish me luck that tomorrow I'll get a few hours of work accomplished, and maybe even some tonight.
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